Society

Thursday

Luke McShane

No. 630

White to play. Mista–Kloza, Poland 1955 (supposedly). Which move does White play to force a quick checkmate? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Tuesday 17 November. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Kd7! If 1…Bg7 2 Nd6 and 3 Ne8 mate. Or if 1…Kg7, 2 Nd6 and Nd6-e8, Nd6xf5 or Ng5-e6 mate. Last week’s winner Anca Gramaticu, Oadby, Leicestershire

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 14 November 2020

It’s been a busy week of bridge. First came the Lady Milne, the women’s home internationals. As the host nation, England had two teams; my partner Qian Li and I qualified for the second. I’ve played in the Lady Milne quite a few times before, and it felt strange and slightly unreal to be doing so online this year — especially as my partner was in China. Still, it was fun, and we finished third, a hair’s breadth behind Wales (but some way behind England’s first team). Next came the OCBL international mixed teams: I was lucky enough to be on Jonathan Harris’s team. Jonathan is one of the most

Taki

The cultural elite has a new enemy

New York Election night parties are usually dreadful affairs, with the idiot box blaring and hysterical listeners screaming out the latest info. American TV pundits are smug trained seals, over made-up and blow-dried, and they all sound the same with their rehearsed stentorian voices. Brian Williams, or the ‘hero of Iraq’ as I call him after he was caught lying about a rocket attack on the chopper he was riding — he was safely on the ground and trembling — sounded sombre announcing that South Dakota had been called for the Donald. These so-called anchors no longer even pretend to be objective, and they had long faces when the predicted

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Vaccine hopes up, Zoom shares down and Biden calls Boris

Home Pfizer and BioNTech announced a vaccine against Covid-19 of 90 per cent efficacy from two injections three weeks apart. It was not known if it prevented transmission of the virus. The vaccine has to be stored at an ultra-low temperature of minus 80˚C. In July, the British government had bought 40 million doses, enough for a third of the population, with ten million available by the end of the year (along with access to five other vaccine candidates, totalling 340 million doses in all). The army and police planned vaccination centres. Shares in air transport went up; shares in Zoom went down. Asked whether we could say with confidence

Toby Young Toby Young

Will my kids report me for hate speech?

When Humza Yousaf, the SNP’s cabinet secretary for justice, announced that his new Hate Crime Bill would remove the ‘dwelling exemption’ in the Public Order Act 1986, people were understandably horrified. As things stand, you cannot be prosecuted for stirring up racial hatred because you’ve said something inflammatory about race or religion in the privacy of your own home. But that’s far too wishy-washy for Yousaf. Not only does he want to enlarge the number of ‘protected’ groups, he also wants the new speech restrictions to apply in people’s homes. Henceforth, Big Brother will be watching you in the kitchen and the bedroom. If Humza Yousaf has his way, there

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I cope with cooking for food snobs?

Q. I have a delightful young goddaughter who, thanks to the virus, I have not seen since last year. Her next birthday is looming, but since she never thanked me for my present last year, I am disinclined to give another. However, there may be a mitigating factor. Last year while her mother and I were cheering her on in a hockey match, I handed the mother a bundle of cash to give her daughter on her birthday a few days later when she had an exeat. Now I wonder if the mother even remembered to pass it on. The trouble is I can’t ask her directly: first because, if

Dot Wordsworth

What’s the difference between ‘gifting’ and ‘giving’?

Boris Johnson, the Telegraph suggested last week, is understood to have a personal interest in rewilding, ‘recently gifting his father beavers to release on his own Exmoor estate’. I started at the word gifting like a horse shying at a carrier bag caught in the hedge. Why didn’t I like it? My first thought was that there was a perfectly good word, giving. My second was that gifting is an obtrusive case of verbing a noun. Thirdly, it seemed like an Americanism. Fourthly, it belongs to a kind of speech adopted by copywriters for luxury cruises and retirement homes. In 1996, Robert Burchfield in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage

Peter Jones

Rome’s collegiate system was more logical than America’s

So Humpty Trumpty has had his great fall. But how democratic or logical was his election in the first place since, thanks to the USA’s ‘collegiate’ system, he became POTUS even though he lost by three million votes? Romans, too, used an undemocratic collegiate system for appointing their consuls, but at least there was a certain logic to it. The logic arose from the Roman ‘class’ system. This defined both how much tax you paid, and in which ‘college’ you were placed for voting purposes. To these ends, regular property censuses divided citizens into seven bands by wealth. The top band (equites) consisted of the richest in society, from which

Jeremy Clarke

I was the only Trump supporter among the olive-pickers

We bums find ourselves sought after at this time of year to lend a hand with the olive harvest. So this week I’ve been standing on a tarpaulin in a sunny field combing olives off olive branches. It’s a good year for olives. The trees are laden and the work is pleasantly monotonous. The minimal level of thought needed to accomplish the task shuts down the internal Red Army choir of negative thoughts that normally drowns out the competition, offering the mind a holiday. In the mornings we combed to the sound of birds twittering in the trees; after lunch to Fip music radio, state-financed, eclectic. On Thursday the smoky-voiced

Melissa Kite

Where’s the slogan saying ‘Lose Weight. Stop Boozing. Survive the virus!’?

Panic at the country feed store. Panic in the horse and pony aisle. I wonder to myself: could life ever be sane again? With apologies to Morrissey and Marr, I started singing a version of their seminal hit on the way back from getting the horse and dog food and I have been humming it ever since. I feel very jaunty, all of a sudden. I know I’m supposed to be paralysed with fear and hugely depressed, but I’m not. Sorry. I arrived at the feed store just in time, getting the last space in the car park before the place became besieged. A little old lady behind me in

The Spectator

Open and shut case: how did lockdown affect shops?

Shot in the arm Global stock markets reached a new high after pharmaceutical firm Pfizer announced a vaccine it is developing has been found to be 90 per cent effective. What have been the best- and worst-performing FTSE 100 shares over the past 12 months? BEST Scot. Mortgage Investment Trust | +109% Ocado | +94% Fresnillo (gold production) | +86% Flutter Entertainment | +75% Polymetal | +51% WORST Rolls-Royce | -74% Int. Consolidated Airlines | -71% BP | -61% Shell (B shares) | -58% Lloyds Bank | -52% Pharma’s life Who was Mr Pfizer? Charles Pfizer set up a factory with his cousin Charles Erhart in Brooklyn in 1849, initially

The Spectator

Letters: Why lockdown II was necessary

Cancelled procedures Sir: Your leader (‘A lockdown too far’, 7 November) suggests that the Prime Minister should have shown ‘leadership’ and ignored Sage’s call for a second national lockdown. Sam Carlisle (‘No respite’, 7 November) illustrates why this would have been a mistake. Sam reminds us that ‘half of community paediatricians were deployed to acute services’ during the pandemic’s first wave. Many other specialists were similarly redeployed. That the NHS was not overwhelmed in the first wave was precisely because most routine work stopped and staff were redeployed en masse to treat Covid-19 patients. Leaving projections aside, there were in fact 13,000 Covid-19 patients in hospital on Sunday 8 November.

Pabulum

2483: In my soup

Unclued lights are defined by extra words in ten clues and are anagrams of ten of a kind. Elsewhere, ignore an apostrophe. Across 9 Medic with hate for compound medication (4)12 Leper snubbed lethargic Arab (5)13 Mark is very into Islay’s liquor (5)14 A software user acquiring flash technology (5)16 Rugged harrier names ruthless smuggler (10, hyphened)18 No longer do crack pastor banned (5)23 Heartless Maurice disrupted fructification (6)26 Tiny daughter breeding fat hen? (4) 29 Blade saboteur left about (5) 30 Drinks from chaps, maiden refused (4)32 Brilliant surgeon forbidding tenor to die (6)33 LBJ, possibly in stirring motorcade, giving nothing away (8)39 Novice red with idealism indeed! (5)41

Simon Barnes

The rise and fall of mink

Mink keeps you warm. That’s a most acceptable bonus, but its prime function is status. This week, however, the focus on mink has been for an altogether different reason. Denmark, the world’s largest exporter of mink skins, began culling 17 million minks to stop a mutated form of coronavirus. As a precaution, Britain has closed its borders to anyone travelling from Denmark. There were once three species of mink: American, European and the sea mink of North America. The last went extinct in the early 20th century because of the fur trade. Minks are related to stoats and otters. They’re great swimmers and have evolved a coat to suit their

Nick Newman

The peerless social satire of Pont of Punch

Eighty years ago this month, the cartoonist Graham Laidler — better known as Pont — died of polio. He contracted the disease while evacuating refugees from London in his car. He was only 32. In 1940, thousands of people were dying in the war, but Pont’s death was marked by an appreciation from J.B. Priestley in the Times, and an outpouring of grief in readers’ letters to the magazine with which he had become synonymous: Punch. Pont, the son of a successful painter and decorator, originally trained as an architect. But after he caught TB, doctors advised him to abandon his work and travel to Austria to recover. There he

Bruce Anderson

Drinking to the glories of Burns and follies of Boris

At least in London, midwinter spring has not been entirely vanquished, and the trees are still a couple of strong winds away from losing their autumn glory. This will give the government some undeserved help. People can sit outside, and the view from windows is not too depressing. Before long, though, those indoors are likely be cursing the PM and his close associates: ‘sic a parcel of rogues in a nation’. Burns and the onset of seasonal bleakness makes one think of the dark. In earlier times in Scotland, Hallowe’en was a characteristic festivity: an attempt to embrace the oncoming winter. Its theme was ghouls and witchcraft. Children, dressed as

John Sturgis

Wishful drinking: pubs have always been good at bending the rules

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy has a running skit about the alehouse in his heroine’s home village where her father, and quite often mother too, disappear for hours at a time. People aren’t allowed to drink on the premises, so are strictly limited to ‘a little board about six inches wide and two yards long, fixed to the garden palings by pieces of wire’. But as the locals don’t like drinking while standing outside, they all head into the landlady’s bedroom and perch on her bed, chest of drawers and washstand while supping ale. And if anyone comes to the door during these sessions, the landlady, as she

Simon Clarke

The questions we must ask about the Covid vaccine

After a difficult nine months, we are naturally all sick of lockdowns and other Covid restrictions. Everyone misses parts of their pre-coronavirus lives, from seeing friends and family, to pubs and restaurants, to the theatre and concerts and, yes, even our workplaces. It was therefore no surprise that this week’s news of a vaccine breakthrough was widely applauded. It is human nature, after all, to cling on to things that give us hope. Hope that was encouraged by leading scientists such as Sir John Bell. After the Pfizer news broke, the Oxford professor was asked on BBC radio whether we would be returning to normal by spring. His response? ‘Yes,

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The ludicrousness of stemmed wine glasses

In 1989 I answered my first mobile phone call on Oxford Street using a brick-sized Motorola borrowed from work. Several people shouted abuse at me from passing cars. Back then, it was also rare to make a mobile-to-mobile call. If you did, it was the main topic of conversation for the first few minutes: ‘Where are you?’ ‘On a boat.’ ‘Wow, I’m on a train going through Leighton Buzzard.’ And you’d laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing. The world’s most ludicrous object is the stemmed wine glass. Why does this idiotic item persist? Now let’s imagine that, owing to a technological limitation, early cellphones hadn’t offered interconnectivity with